Learning a Few Lessons From a Tragic Moment
All the venting and fulminating about gas prices here last week just about drowned out the 20th anniversary of the fire in the fourth block of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Not far from the crippled plant, mourners lighted candles in memory of the firefighters who died trying to contain the blaze. But though it went largely unnoticed in much of the rest of the world, the anniversary highlighted how much, and how little, have changed in the way the world sees, and seeks to meet, its spiraling energy needs. Republicans and Democrats risked almost bodily harm as they sought to outpander each other over the growing panic at the pump. Calls for investigations of oil companies' eye-popping profits, a suspension of the federal tax on gasoline, scrapping environmental rules--virtually every boneheaded idea out there had more than its share of champions. No one, of course, even tried to make the case that the global energy picture has profoundly changed, that this is not 1973, and that if we don't start changing our ways soon, really bad things are going to happen.
Which is why the Chernobyl anniversary, oddly enough, offers just a small glimmer of hope. More than three decades ago, when he helped found the group Greenpeace, Patrick Moore believed that "nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust." It was hardly a radical view, and it became crystallized in the minds of many with the disaster at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 and the meltdown at Chernobyl seven years later. Funny how time can change perspective. A few weeks ago, writing in the Washington Post, Moore broke ranks with his Greenpeace confederates and said that nuclear power "may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change."
Sadly, we don't have decades to change our blinkered views on energy, the single greatest economic challenge of our times. But if old nuke haters like Moore can change their spots, there's no reason that SUV-driving, fossil-fuel-loving Americans can't, too.
This story appears in the May 8, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.